(Harold L. Ickes was a member of Roosevelt's "inner Cabine...)
Harold L. Ickes was a member of Roosevelt's "inner Cabinet" from 1933 until the President's death. The first of this series of volumes covers the first F.D.R. administration. It is the rough, unvarnished, sometimes rude story of how the basic patterns were set, during something over a thousand days - actually 1,330, for twenty unbroken years of rule by the Democratic party. Here is a new picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt which will disturb both his idolaters and his bitter enemies. Plus information about Henry Morgenthau, Henry A. Wallace, Huey P. Long, Alf M. Landon, William Randolph Hearst, and General Douglas A. MacArthur. His diary - shortened but without a word changed - makes caustic, often unkind, and fascinating reading.
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Harold L. Ickes was born on March 15, 1874 on a farm near Holidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He grew up in nearby Altoona, where his father ran a store and dabbled in local politics. At the age of 16, after his mother's death, he went to Chicago to live with his aunt and uncle.
Following his graduation from high school, Ickes attended the University of Chicago part time, graduating in 1897. Ten years later he also received his law degree from the university, although he never maintained a regular practice.
Ickes was a prominent local and regional political adviser and campaign organizer for reform-minded Republican office seekers in Illinois. However, his political irregularity was notorious in party circles. In 1912 he fervently backed Theodore Roosevelt's presidential candidacy on the Progressive party ticket. In 1920, after he failed in his attempt to get the Republican presidential nomination for California Progressive Hiram Johnson, Ickes voted for the Democratic candidate. In 1924 and 1928 he again voted for Democratic presidential candidates. Ickes worked hard in Franklin Roosevelt's presidential campaign in 1932. After Roosevelt's overwhelming victory Ickes actively sought appointment as Indian commissioner in the Interior Department. He first met Roosevelt in February 1933, after which the president-elect named him secretary of the interior. Besides his duties as Interior secretary in a greatly stepped-up Federal conservation program, Ickes served as administrator of the National Recovery Administration's code for the petroleum industry and as head of the Public Works Administration. He economically administered the letting of billions of dollars in Federal contracts for a great variety of undertakings, including much new naval construction. Despite Ickes's disputes with fellow New Dealers and his generally cantankerous disposition, Roosevelt appreciated his abilities. During World War II as petroleum administrator for war, Ickes coordinated the conservation, acquisition, and allocation of the nation's oil resources. Roosevelt's death in April 1945 was a deep personal loss to Ickes. He never really got along with Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman. In 1946, when President Truman tried to appoint an oil company executive as undersecretary of the Navy, Ickes attacked the administration for lack of interest in oil conservation and angrily announced his resignation. His tenure as secretary of the interior had been the longest in the department's history. Leaving government service, Ickes lived in semiretirement with his family on his farm near Olney, Md. He wrote a syndicated newspaper column and contributed regularly to the liberal weekly New Republic. On February 3, 1952 he died in a Washington hospital.
Ickes was a key architect of liberal principles through the depression and World War II. A staunch advocate for civil rights, he opposed the mass exclusion and incarceration of Japanese Americans, and, after the War Relocation Authority came under his management in 1944, was one of the most outspoken advocates for ending exclusion to the West Coast and for fair play for Japanese Americans.
(Harold L. Ickes was a member of Roosevelt's "inner Cabine...)
Ickes was considered a prominent liberal spokesman, a skillful orator and a noted supporter of many African-American causes, although he was at times politically expedient where state-level segregation was concerned.
In 1907 Ickes married Anna Wilmarth Thompson, a wealthy widow, with whom he had a son. She died in 1935. Three years later Ickes had married Jane Dahlman, a recent college graduate; they had two children.
